Sermon notes for May 25

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God”, or – as the translation we heard today put it, “Strive first for the kingdom of God”. Those words are so familiar. They are so very familiar we sometimes don’t quite hear them. When that happens, when we don’t quite hear the words or when we let them toll right over us without having any real effect, we can refresh ourselves, refresh our memories and refresh our souls by looking at these old, old words in a new way.

Here’s one new way I found to look at these old words. What you do – and this works especially well if you do it in a Sunday School classroom, but we can pretend! What you do is, you take an empty peanut butter jar, and you hold it up. You also have a big bowl of rice or sand with you, and a golf ball. So you hold up the peanut butter jar, and you say, it’s easy for our lives and our days to get filled up. You take a scoop of rice and put it in the jar, and say, our families and our friends keep us busy. Another scoop of rice goes into the jar. Our work keeps us busy. Keeping up with election year issues takes up some time. Paying the bills takes time. Another scoop, or two, or three goes into the jar. If we’re Orioles fans, or Ravens fans, or NASCAR fans, following our teams keeps us busy, fills up our time. Another scoop goes into the jar for our “to do lists”. The jar is getting full by now, but we might be able to get in another scoop or two for our favorite reality shows, computer games, the things we do when we just kick back and relax. By now, the jar is almost full to the brim. So when you pick up the golf ball, and say, sometimes it seems there just isn’t much time for God in our lives – well, it’s easy to see that there isn’t enough room left in the peanut butter jar for the golf ball. Not much time left in our lives for God at all.

So – you pour out the rice, pick up the peanut butter jar again, and say HOWEVER, when you put God into your life FIRST – and into the peanut butter jar goes the golf ball – when you put God into your life FIRST (and here you pour the rice back into the jar, right around that golf ball) – just like that, when you put God in your life first, there’s room enough for everything else, too.

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